In the data-driven world of customer support and customer experience, focusing just on speed or call volume has the potential to miss the true financial reality of your operation. To really understand the efficiency of your team, you need to answer questions like — what is Cost-Per-Resolution?
Cost-Per-Resolution (CPR) measures the total financial investment required to completely solve a customer's issue from start to finish, regardless of how many calls, emails, or chats it takes. It is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) in customer experience because it forces a business to balance operational costs with actual effectiveness in customer support. This ensures that the goal is not just to answer the phone — but to resolve the issue.
Calculating this key metric is pretty straightforward if you have a clear concept of your department's total expenses. To determine your Cost-Per-Resolution, you take the total operational costs of your support team for a set period of time — including customer service rep salaries, software licensing, overhead, and training — and divide that number by the total number of customer service inquiries resolved during that same period of time.
Cost-Per-Resolution = Total Customer Service Operational Costs ÷ Total Number of Inquiries Resolved
Why Is Cost-Per-Resolution Important?
While performance metrics like Average Handle Time (AHT) measure speed, Cost-Per-Resolution measures value. It is a great metric for gauging business health because it highlights inefficiency. If a customer has to call back three times to fix one issue, your Cost-Per-Contact might look low over a longer period, but your Cost-Per-Resolution will be higher. Monitoring this KPI allows businesses to see the true cost of customer support and identify where money is being lost, allowing them to adapt operations and eliminate friction.
Reveals Operational Efficiency
Cost-Per-Resolution cuts through the noise of vanity metrics that look good, but do not provide meaningful data — and shows you how effective your customer service team actually is at solving problems. If your CPR is high despite short call times, it can indicate a poor First Contact Resolution (FCR) rate, meaning your agents are rushing through calls without fixing the issue.
Direct Impact on Profitability
This metric draws a direct line between customer support actions and the company's bottom line. By taking steps to lower your CPR through better agent training or customer self-service tools, you are directly increasing the company's profit margins by reducing the operational costs required to solve issues for each customer.
Identifies Training and Product Gaps
Tracking CPR helps businesses better identify specific call types or product issues that are more expensive to fix. If a specific category of complaint has a higher resolution cost, it triggers a clear need for a root-cause analysis to either improve the product itself or provide agents with better resources to handle those complicated scenarios.
READ MORE: Is Net Promoter Score the Best Customer Experience Metric to Track?
Moving beyond simple call tracking to gain a better understanding of what Cost-Per-Resolution is allows you to transform your customer support team from a cost sink into a value driver. By optimizing for resolution rather than just contact metrics, you save money while delivering a better experience for your customers.
Contact boostCX today for a demo of our customer experience management platform and start measuring the KPIs that matter most!
